I’ve always enjoyed BBC shows – especially classic comedy like Are You Being Served and Keeping Up Appearances, not to mention some of the current stuff that turns up on BBC America. One reason is that there is a level of freedom with humor – including somewhat risqué humor – that you just don’t find here in the USA. Unfortunately, as Mark Steyn notes, there may be a move to clamp down on “offensive humor” – and that is a bad thing.

If the pen is mightier than the sword, then criminalizing words is a way of disarming potential opposition, of inculcating a reflexive self-censorship in the citizenry. And, after all, self-suppression is the most cost-effective of tyranny. Political correctness isn’t merely the blasphemy law of our time. It makes communication impossible. It renders a people literally illiterate: the conventions of language used by functioning societies throughout human history—irony, indirect quotation, period evocation, and, yes, even comic stereotype—are all suddenly suspect. What a strange fate to embrace. In London, the Lord Chamberlain’s power to censor West End plays was finally abolished in 1968: it was widely accepted by then that there was something absurd in a palace courtier ruling that your script could have three “Bastards!” but not four, and that two specific references to sodomy had to be replaced with one vague allusion to heavy petting. Yet, four decades on, Britons now think it entirely normal for police constables and time-serving bureaucrats to function as literary critics determining the “intent” behind a throwaway jest.

To hell with it, and to hell with “sensitivity training.” The only way a multicultural society can live in freedom is with what the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle calls “insensitivity training”: we all need to develop thicker skin and rub along—without government monitoring. “CSI Catskills” is a totalitarian concept, and only a bunch of fairies would fall for it.

And just to clarify: IÂ’m not saying youÂ’re a fairy if you have sex with other men.
I am saying youÂ’re a fairy if you think the state should police our jokes.

Indeed, I wonder if any of the favorite shows mentioned above could really meet the standard set by the new law. And having seen PC sensitivities ratcheted up in this country in recent years, I know that this has diminished our entertainment as well as our ability to confront prejudice through humor. After all, could All In The Family be made today? I doubt it, even though the humor that would be forbidden is the sort of stuff that actually ridiculed the insensitive rather than their targets. After all, mockery has its place – and it is not the place of government to decide whose views are correct and may therefore be expressed (and conversely, wrong and not to be expressed) on social and political issues.

For that matter, I wonder if Elton John -- himself a proud gay man – could possibly get away with making this classic song.

After all, not only wonÂ’t people be allowed to laugh, even making the joke in the first place would be a violation of the law.

Posted by: Greg at 11:27 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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